Proving the Obviously Untrue - programming

Geany and other Development Tools

nospam@example.com (Colin Turner) — Sat, 26 Apr 2008 22:28:17 +0000

I've tried lots of programming editors and ides over the years, obviously in Unix and Linux this is a Holy War, particularly between the advocates of vi and emacs. It is common for both groups to suggest that the other editor is hopelessly over-complex or clumsy. I think there's some truth in that, because essentially, they both stink.

I tend to be an emacsen user myself, but I just think emacs is slightly less awful than vi. My first action on a new install is usually to use vi to edit my sources.list in Debian, to help me install emacs. Perhaps thats strange, because I really like sed. So what's the problem with them? They both share this kind of puritanically awkward interface that works well on a console, but sucks in a GUI. They both use ridiculously arcane sequences of key presses to do anything, and I mean even basic stuff like saving and quitting. Yes, yes, you don't have to lecture me about old terminals and their limitations, been there done that, got the t-shirt. I tend to do all my systems maintenance in emacs, but when I'm programming, I've started to love the softness of a decent editor that actually makes it plain and simple to edit multiple buffers of source code, even though its a pain to use different editors for console and gui work.
Continue reading "Geany and other Development Tools"

Fixing truncated printing with Firefox

nospam@example.com (Colin Turner) — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 22:18:50 +0000

A while ago, I discovered that my current main development project OPUS had an odd problem when printing out of a gecko based browser.

It would print the first page, whether in portrait or landscape, and if there was more content, it would be abruptly truncated and the second page would contain merely the footer off the page. I've been meaning to try and solve the problem with a print stylesheet for a while and finally did so today.
Continue reading "Fixing truncated printing with Firefox"

Drupal Login Problems

nospam@example.com (ct) — Wed, 13 Dec 2006 11:48:37 +0000

So, in order to post that rant about PHP and SimpleXML I had to fix a problem that seems to have spontaneously arisen with Drupal (this content management system). For some reason it wasn't persisting login information, at least from firefox (sorry - iceweasel here on my Debian system). It's interesting to note, reading about the bug, that it has been around for literally months and doesn't seem to have been nailed. So, anyway, I've installed some beta of Drupal, and yes, it now seems to be fixed... If I could only solve the problem that I can't "uncollapse" parts of the content now. UPDATE: OK, this seems to be a problem with firefox version 2, or probably really the CSS file for it. It works with Galeon, or when I tell firefox to fake being IE .

SimpleXML should be called BloodyAckwardXML

nospam@example.com (ct) — Wed, 13 Dec 2006 11:39:00 +0000

Another night of coding in PHP, and I've officially decided that SimpleXML utterly irritates me. I'd already discovered, much to my irritation, that is virtually impossible to handle SimpleXML objects elegantly with the Smarty template engine - but now I discover I can't even shove them in a PHP session without trouble - when you next visit the site you get stuff like this: Warning: session_start() [function.session-start]: Node no longer exists and then more trouble. As part of a new Web Application Framework I'm working on I wanted to parse XML configuration files one time only, and then cache the results in the session. It looks like I now have to totally redesign my idea . You can see the work in progress at its home page.